Thanks for coming to my home page. I have operated www.brie.com
since its inception.
I am very passionate
about GNU/Linux, so if you have an opportunity working with GNU/Linux,
I am definitely interested. I find that my skills sway between programming
and system administration. With better systems, I can do better
programming, and once I tweaked something to my liking, I like to
roll better tools to do even more.
I lead the Sacramento Linux Users Group. In fact, over the five and half years I have run SacLUG, we have exchanged somewhere around fifteen thousand messages. The archives have become a valuable resource used by GNU/Linux users worldwide. Our mailing list is our most valuable asset. Once a month, we host vis a vis meetings, but most progress comes
through individual efforts within the group along with a maintained philosophy
"Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS)".
My strongest language is
PERL. I started doing CGI programming seven years ago, back
when it was chosen tool because of the ease one could manipulate
strings. PERL suffered the reputation of being slow because it used
to be that you had to fire up an interpretor for each hit on the web
server. Use of PERL has advanced, and the toolset has grown. In
PERL, you can install all the tools from CPAN, by installing the
Apache::Bundle. This is great because it seemed that the it wasn't
clear what tools one needed when doing web programming. That is
unless you had a clear set of examples such as Randal Schwartz's articles
at hand. Then to overcome the speed issue, now has the advantage
of being embedded into the web server. Since Apache is event driven,
you can take control of the web server at any given step of the way.
It's definitely a chain saw tool of choice. It's a little complex,
but it's powerful. I was tweaking with some mod perl apps at World
Com, so I will have to develop some for brie.com.
My other passion is systems design. I mean designing systems to
provide network services. With Linux, a normal person can design
equivalent system to that used by large corporations. I worked
in Solaris for the past two years, but the toolset on a freshly
installed Linux box is so comprehensive. Plus, using Debian packaging
management, one can easily maintain a large network of servers
and maintain a database of their installed software. Linux really
accels in this area. You can do most things in Linux using your own handrolled
services. Linux now has LVM, and RAID, plus it has hardware support for controllers
that can manage large disk arrays. Now granted I haven't dug too far into Veritas,
but I am sure if I were to build a large disk array under Linux, it would be doable.
And... if it wasn't I could build a large cluster of Linux boxen and accomplish
the same thing. I can't knock Solaris too hard. Linux would certainly be my first
choice of architecting systems and integrating them into applications.
Since I am not working at the current time. I will be focus on system building
activities along with web based applications. Check this page for activity and
if you have a job with Web Development or Systems Design, please contact me
for an interview.
